Playing up

I recently posed a question to a creative professional I know. I presented to him this comparison, a created work completed in ones mid to late 20s, which was over time revisited and in some ways reimagined, versus the second or third draft of a piece completed years later, early to mid 30s. The ages are arbitrary. What I was getting at is one piece was done without the benefit of the extra years of wisdom and understanding, but it was edited and retooled, whereas the other was less modified but it benefitted the most from all available years of experience.

His first answer was not an answer. He saw what I was getting at, at what I was really trying to investigate, and he said, "some ideas are just better than others." That struck a cord with me, but more on that later. I further clarified that it wasn't about good or bad, it was more about what is more valuable, what should, everything else being equal, be the better work, the one we complete at our most experienced, or the one we complete with the most diligence? Then he said, "the one I work on the most will be the most technically sound," with no hesitation. We talked about the gestation period of ideas, and how they many times benefit from going back and working them over again, holding them upside down and shaking them vigorously.

I have finished the first read through of the number of novels I plan on submitting come November. I intended to start on my sci-fi piece, the oldest one, the one I went back and completely re-wrote, the one on its latest draft. I meant to start there because in the back of my mind, I considered it the weakest. I defaulted to thinking that my newer stories were better, not just because they were newer, but because of what them being newer meant. Like the conversation with  my friend, each of them was standing on the one that came before it, each work below it was a kind of creative soil that it was able to benefit from in growing. But as usual, I did not start on that novel. The novel I finished working through was the middle child. Initially I had intended to send it off to a couple readers, and just wanted to make sure the beginning was as crisp as I could manage. Much like a pencil in a sharpener, I just kept going. A week passed, and I had chucked my strategy out of the nearest window.

Yesterday I finally started on the sci fi offering. It was not what I remembered it to be. Since finishing its latest draft, I've written two other novels, and been mostly satisfied with them both. I suppose my excitement over those dimmed my fascination with the other. I wouldn't say it is a bad story. It has a certain density that fools one into remembering that things that happened earlier in the book happened later, that stretches the summary of "things that happened" over the novel's breadth. I looked around for the person that had stolen my confidence in what was, at worst, a very decent effort. Of course, there was no one about but Time. I began to suspect that absence and fondness don't have as good a marriage as most think. I also wondered at the words, that some ideas are simply better than others, and how to decide who I loved more between my children.

All of that is to say I am working. The novels are getting better, and I strive to make that a truth everyday.

I told that same friend that I was thinking of going back to working on plays. My first effort was terrible, the kind of terrible that makes a person quit and do something else immediately. He confided in me that he had a similar experience, that somewhere among his papers was a play he wrote in undergrad that was maybe the worst thing he had ever done. He interrupted my asking if he would show it to me by saying that I would never see it. The reason I told him that I wanted to go back and work on plays is because I had done such a terrible job. I suppose to some degree I thought I was better than what I produced, but it wasn't so much that I gave up because it was bad, more that I left it alone because I had no idea about how to fix it. Plays I've read recently, bad ones, high school ones, showered me with insight about what not to do, and in so not doing, what to do. The idea that I could improve, or maybe rectify an error, has been persistently consuming. My friend admitted that he almost always took the easy path. His career decision was him playing to his strengths, and he is very successful.

Whereas it feels very often like I am making the difficult choice for the sake of its challenge. But I can't help but think about what we earn when we overcome walls of varying heights and the difference in those rewards. They say you learn more from failure. They say failure proves that you're trying.

I'm still not sure yet if I someday want to be among they, or not.

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